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Fireworks laws have changed over the past few years in the state's most populous counties. Here's what you should know.

SEATTLE — As Fourth of July celebrations get underway in western Washington, here’s what you should know about lighting fireworks.

Across the state, it is illegal to set fireworks off after 11 p.m., with the exception of the Fourth of July.

Firework laws have changed over the past couple of years in the state's most populous counties. In Washington, any city or county can limit or prohibit the sale, purchase, possession or use of consumer fireworks.

Here's where you can and can't use fireworks in western Washington:

King County

Fireworks are banned in unincorporated King County, in all city, county and state parks, and within most city limits except for the following:

Snohomish County

Fireworks are allowed in approved parts of unincorporated Snohomish County and the following cities:

In Stanwood, Darrington and Sultan, fireworks are allowed to be used July 4 until midnight and July 5 from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Fireworks are banned in all city, county and state parks.

Pierce County

2023 was the first year fireworks in unincorporated areas of the county were only allowed on July 4. The Pierce County Council passed the ordinance in 2022.

Additionally, some cities have adjusted the days and times when fireworks can be used.

Fireworks are banned in all city, county and state parks and within most city limits except for the following:

Island County

Legal fireworks are allowed on the days before, on and following the Fourth of July.

All fireworks are banned in all Island County and state parks, federal land and public property.

Kitsap County

The discharge of fireworks is banned on Bainbridge Island and in all city, county and state parks. Fireworks are allowed in the following cities:

Thurston County

The cities of Tumwater, Lacey and Olympia prohibit the purchase, sale and discharge of fireworks at all times.

Fireworks can be used in unincorporated Thurston County on July 3 and 4 from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Skagit County

In unincorporated Skagit County, it is illegal to discharge fireworks except during the following:

Whatcom County

Consumer fireworks can be discharged in unincorporated areas during the following:

Fireworks safety

According to the American Red Cross, fireworks start an average of 18,000 fires a year, including 1,300 structure fires and 300 vehicle fires. Here are a few tips they provide for firework safety:

Mason County deputies are searching for 49-year-old Domingo Mendoza, an inmate who escaped from a jail road litter cleanup crew around 11:30 a.m. today. Mendoza, a jail trustee, was last seen wearing a Mason County Jail t-shirt, blue jeans, and an orange hat; authorities advise the public not to approach him and to call 911 if he's sighted.

MASON COUNTY, Wash. - The Mason County Sheriff's Office is actively searching for a jail inmate who escaped from custody Thursday morning.

What we know:

Deputies say jail trustee Domingo Pablo Mendoza, 49, escaped from a road litter clean-up crew on Northeast Tahuya Blacksmith Road, between Bear Creek Road and Bennettson Road, northwest of Belfair.

Mendoza is 5'4", 220 lbs with brown eyes and black hair. He was wearing an orange "Mason County Jail" t-shirt, blue jeans and an orange hat.

Mason County deputies have contained the search are for Mendoza.

If you see Mendoza, do not approach him and call 911 immediately.

Anyone with information about Mendoza’s whereabouts or possible assistance he may be receiving is asked to call 911.

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With Microsoft’s latest layoffs Wednesday, the quickening contraction of Seattle-area tech is starting to feel like previous industry meltdowns, when mounting job losses signaled deep disruptions in the regional economy.

Since May, Microsoft has announced around 15,000 layoffs, including 4,000 in Washington, as the Redmond-based company continues to disrupt its own operations with the powerful artificial intelligence technology it is pitching to customers.

Taken alone, those cuts pale next to the massive layoffs during previous industry downturns — the construction industry crash in the Great Recession of 2008-2009, for example, or the tech layoffs in the dot-com bust in 2000, or, certainly, the Boeing Bust during 1969-1971, when 60,000-plus aerospace workers lost their jobs.

But Microsoft’s recent cuts are more significant when seen as part of a broader pullback as Big Tech, long known for rapid growth and generous salaries, scrambles to reinvent its labor model, experts say.

Microsoft to lay off about 9,000 employees in latest round

Maybe the Seattle-area won’t see a return of billboards asking the last person leaving to “turn out the lights,” as happened in the Boeing Bust, says University of Washington labor economist Yael Midnight.

But Midnight adds, if AI delivers its much-promised efficiencies to Big Tech, the era of “that kind of money coming into the community seems to be nearing its end.”

How deeply AI disrupts Big Tech as a local job creator remains to be seen. But employment in the sector has already shrunk by nearly 6% since its peak in late 2022, according to state data.

And more cuts seem inevitable as powerful new technologies upend Big Tech much as its own products disrupted other sectors in the past.

“The chickens are coming home to roost for the tech sector,” said Jacob Vigdor, an economist with the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy who follows state and local job markets.

Experts like Vigdor and Midnight are quick to emphasize important differences between Big Tech’s current contraction and the previous sector collapses.

The Boeing Bust, for example, followed what was arguably a once-in-a-century perfect storm of economic bad news.

That included higher-than-expected development costs for the 747, falling aircraft sales after nearly a decadelong boom and the cancellation of federal funding for Boeing’s supersonic aircraft.

The combination pushed Boeing to the brink of bankruptcy and forced the company to cut around 60% of its workforce.

The dot-com bubble of the 1990s, meanwhile, was fueled in part by overeager investors propping up tech startups long on hype but short on actual products.

While some dot-com startups, notably Amazon, had solid prospects, many others stayed afloat only because investors were “willing to throw lots of cash at them,” Vigdor said.

Those firms “were doomed as soon as the animal spirits of the market started to turn against them,” Vigdor said.

The resulting bust forced even Amazon to cut to the bone — including around 1,300 workers, or 15% of its staff, in 2001 — to survive.

On the surface, tech’s situation today is light-years from what confronted either Boeing or the dot-com players, Vigdor said. Unlike those earlier crashes, Big Tech is still booming, with lots of business, deep pockets and huge profits.

Even so, Big Tech has faced its own perfect storm in recent years.

High interest rates have hampered internal investment. The government has imposed hiring restrictions for the foreign tech workers that have been so key to Big Tech’s recent growth.

More broadly, starting around 2022, many tech firms began to correct what came to be seen as excessive hiring.

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Until then, many companies prioritized continued expansion into new products, services and markets. As a result, they also prioritized aggressive hiring — and generous compensation — to handle the expected workload, said Evan Seguirant, a veteran tech recruiter and founder of Voyager Talent, a Seattle-area firm.

The industry’s hiring philosophy, Seguirant said, was, “we’re growing. We’re adding new features, we’re adding new functionality, and the job market is booming.”

By 2022 or so, however, many tech firms realized the hot job market “was pretty much unsustainably hot,” and were pulling back on hiring, Seguirant said.

Taken together, these factors effectively paused hiring in a sector that for years seemed perpetually starved for talent.

Between January 2015 and August 2022, employment in the “information” job category, which includes most tech sector jobs, grew 57%, or around 7.5% a year, to 175,000 in Washington, according to the state Employment Security Department.

Disruptors disrupted

Hiring for ‘information’ jobs, which includes most tech workers, has fallen sharply in Washington since late-2022 as AI and other factors upend Big Tech’s traditional high-growth labor strategy.

Source: Washington state Employment Security Department (Chris Kaeser / The Seattle Times)

That’s more than three times the growth rate for total state employment.

Since fall 2022, however, information sector employment has fallen nearly 6%, or roughly 2% a year, to 165,200, according to state data through May.

That compares to a 10% employment drop the aftermath of the 2000-2001 dot-com bust.

Although a lot of that recent correction was likely without AI, some experts say, the technology has added a massive new twist to the tech job market.

Companies like Microsoft have made huge investments in AI, which has left them with less to spend on hiring.

As important, many tech firms face huge pressure to use that AI technology to transform their own internal operations and labor models.

Where earlier waves of automation upended blue collar sectors, such as manufacturing, AI is now “affecting jobs that historically were safe from automation,” said Anneliese Vance-Sherman, chief labor economist at the state Employment Security Department.

And because many of those “historically safe” jobs are in the tech sector itself, companies now are in the awkward position of needing to demonstrate their new tools on their own operations.

“If you’re preaching about the efficiency of AI, and you’re making so many investments in AI, why would you … continue to hire, hire, hire and grow into a massive, bloated company?” said Voyager’s Seguirant.

“That, as a general, permeating mindset, leads to much different ways in which these companies act, including in how they hire,” he added.

What this new mindset actually means in terms of actual job growth going forward is a complicated question.

With the industry’s hiring correction largely completed, one big unknown is how quickly AI will not only replace current jobs but also create new ones.

Although Microsoft itself insists it isn’t using AI to replace programmers and other workers, other firms have been more explicit about the impacts on hiring.

In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees the company’s growing internal use of AI could lower the number of corporate employees over the next few years.

One likely scenario, some experts say, is several years of smaller layoffs, as tech companies figure out how to deploy the new technology and discover new uses.

Hiring growth could resume after that, albeit at a rate well below that of the past two decades.

That’s likely to mean a lot of anxiety for current tech employees, and frustration for the tens of thousands of students who poured into computer science programs in the hopes of six figure salaries and stock options.

It’s also certain to mean changes for a region long accustomed to the steady influx of well-paid workers.

A decade ago, that influx was so powerful that it helped pull the Seattle-area out of the Great Recession, when the more traditional job creator, the construction sector, was still flat on its back, said Vance-Sherman, with the state Employment Security Department.

In the years since, that influx has fueled a huge jump in regional wealth for both private companies but also governments, which have gained in tax revenue on construction and real estate sales.

With AI, however, a very different scenario emerges — one in which the tech sectors remains highly profitable, but the region sees less growth in spending and taxes.

If AI is a success, a slower growing tech sector could “continue to innovate and bring new products and services to market and rake in profits far as the eye can see,” Vigdor said.

But for all the businesses that have grown to depend on a faster growing tech sector, this new, more efficient hiring model could prove costly. And a public sector long accustomed to tech-fuel tax growth is “going to be dealing with catastrophe,” Vigdor said.

Microsoft Philanthropies underwrites some Seattle Times journalism projects.

Paul Roberts: [email protected].

The House of Representatives on Thursday passed a sweeping budget bill, sending it to President Donald Trump’s desk for signing and delivering on some of his biggest domestic policy promises.

The bill will cut spending on social safety net programs, like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, while broadly slashing taxes, particularly for high-income earners. While the long-term ramifications of the bill may take months or years to manifest, some of its effects could be felt immediately.

Trump tax bill could force special session in WA, Ferguson says

Washington homeowners in particular stand to benefit from a provision that increases the amount in property tax payments they can deduct on their 2025 federal returns.

Previously, taxpayers could deduct up to $10,000 in state and local taxes on their returns, a limit known as the “SALT” deduction cap. The budget bill raises that cap to $40,000 this year, with staggered increases running through 2029. The cap is scheduled to fall back to $10,000 in 2030.

“You can see how at $10,000, you could eat that up pretty quickly with just property taxes,” said Mark Harmsworth, small business director at the Washington Policy Center, a think tank that advocates for free-market policies.

With the higher SALT deduction cap, taxpayers can significantly reduce their taxable income, he said. “If you’re a property owner, this is going to help you.”

In Washington, about 1 in 10 tax returns includes a SALT deduction claim, making it among the states with the highest number of taxpayers using the benefit, according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data published by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Tax relief under the provision won’t be evenly felt. Taxpayers can claim the benefit only if they itemize their deductions, a practice more common among high-income earners.

“It’s not a huge benefit to most Washingtonians,” said Eli Taylor Goss, executive director of the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, a research organization focused on economic equity.

Taylor Goss pointed out that more Washingtonians would benefit from an increase to the SALT deduction cap if the state had an income tax. In the absence of that, it’s people who own property that will primarily benefit, they said. “The SALT program won’t give the necessary relief to the families that need it most.”

Other provisions eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay, reduce taxes for most seniors and maintain current income tax brackets, which were otherwise set to expire and increase at the end of the year.

More on the Trump administration

Jessica Fu: 206-464-8502 or [email protected]. Jessica Fu is a Seattle Times business reporter covering the affordability crisis.

TACOMA, Wash. - Fireworks, even sparklers, are illegal in Tacoma.

Yet, the fire department spent plenty of resources last Fourth of July dedicated to fireworks.

What they're saying:

Officials with the department tell FOX 13 Seattle on July 4, 2024, Tacoma Fire responded to about 18 firework-related calls.

"We had our crews running from fire to fire to fire to fire," said Chelsea Shepherd with the Tacoma Fire Department. "There are only so many fire engines. There are only so many crew, and when we’re responding to these preventable incidents it occupies all of our time and focus," she added.

Up the road in Auburn, there is a place where you can enjoy fireworks and not break the law.

"We’re here as a family business. We’re here to give something for people to do that’s been banned everywhere else that’s not tribal land," said Hailey Joe, fireworks commissioner for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.

There are also a variety of fireworks shows happening across western Washington, free and open to the public.

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